Barzun's mind was one of world's wonders

By Cary Clack, For the Express-News :
October 30, 2012
: Updated: October 30, 2012 3:17pm

Author Jacques Barzun speaks at University Presbyterian Church in 2010. Barzun, who died last week at 104, was dignified, kind and had a strong sense of humor.

Photo By ERIC GAY/STF

In this Sept. 17, 2002 file photo, Jacques Barzun sits for a portrait at his home in San Antonio. Barzun, the pioneering cultural historian who became a best-selling author in his 90s with "From Dawn to Decadence," has died. He was 104. Barzun's son-in-law says Barzun passed away Thursday, Oct. 25, 2012, in San Antonio, where he'd lived in recent years. Barzun wrote dozens of books and essays on everything from philosophy and music to detective novels. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

More than eight years ago, I went to my mailbox in the newsroom of the San Antonio Express-News, found a letter addressed to me from Jacques Barzun and almost collapsed from the anticipated intellectual beat-down no doubt coming from this historic and iconic writer and thinker. Such was my self-confidence that I assumed I'd written something Barzun had dismantled point by point. To my surprise, it was a note praising me for a column I'd written on education.

I wrote back thanking Barzun for his generous note and telling him how much I admired him and his writing. This led to an invitation to visit him and his lovely wife, Marguerite, in their Oakwell Farms home and a friendship that was enriched, over the years, by an exchange of notes, cards, books and laughter.

In between Marguerite's phone calls last Thursday, the last one bearing the news that Jacques had just died at the age of 104, I found myself thinking of his wonderful sense of humor.

Yes, as a child in Paris, he was taught to tell time by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. He earned global acclaim as one of the great thinkers of the two centuries in which he lived; appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1956; possessed an unlimited and otherworldly knowledge of all things; and was a National Book Award finalist at the age of 92 for his masterpiece, "Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life." And, yes, in his mannerisms, dress, speech and writing, he was an elegant model of style and dignity.

But the man was funny. He could write this: "Punsters should not be blamed. Medical research has found in some people a gland, the puncreas, which when inflamed causes one to puncreate."

In a witty knockdown of cynicism in "Meditations on the Literature of Spying," he wrote: "To know in advance that everything and everybody is a fraud gives the derivative types what they call a wry satisfaction. Their borrowed system creates the ironies that twist their smiles into wryness. They look wry and drink rye and make a virtue of taking the blows of fate wryly. It is monotonous. I am fed up with the life of wryly."

Jacques wasn't a man of his time - he was a man of all times, as comfortable in the world of the 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne as he was in the 20th-century world of baseball legend Mickey Mantle of his beloved New York Yankees.

The first time I heard the name Jacques Barzun was when I was 11 years old and falling in love with baseball. During a commercial that aired during NBC's game of the week, accompanied by a voiceover, appeared these words:

" 'Whoever wants to understand the heart and mind of America had better understand baseball.'

Jacques Barzun"

That was the first sentence of his 1953 essay "On Baseball," and it is now on a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Yep, Jacques Barzun is even in the Baseball Hall of Fame. The first time I met him, I asked him to recite it and he did, with a smile and twinkle in his eyes.

For all of Jacques' extraordinary gifts, none exceeded his gift for humanity and his talent for making friends and making people feel comfortable and important.

He would have turned 105 on Nov. 30. We marveled at his longevity not simply because of the length of years but for the astonishing vitality of his mind that, until the end, remained one of the wonders of this world. Because of that powerful mind, it was sometimes easy not to fully appreciate his physical problems.

In a note dated Oct. 4, 2007, eight weeks before his centennial, he wrote, "It's no fun being 100 - I don't recommend it."

Yet, with his remarkable Marguerite by his side, he continued to live with grace and a loving heart.

Of Abraham Lincoln, Jacques wrote, "A great man of the past is hard to know, because his legend, which is a sort of friendly caricature, hides him like a disguise."

Jacques Barzun was a great man of the past and present. As sterling and impressive as was his legend, the actual man, this gentle and kind friend to so many of us, was even better.